What It's like to ride the Red Line from Garfield almost all the way to Howard.

I’ve always had a strange passion to go to the North Side of Chicago. Whenever I rode the Green line, I wondered what existed at the mystical Howard Red Line stop. And so one day I decided to go there. Seriously. I wanted to see the magical ponies and fountains of gold that surely existed on the beautiful far North Side.

I hopped on the 55 bus at University avenue, and saw the combination of low-grade housing, community centers, and abandoned storefronts slipping past me on Garfield Boulevard. I imagined that this run-down commercial district would be replicated in nothing but glory and ponies when I got up north.

When I got to the Red Line stop, there were no policemen there. That surprised me, because I know that all the criminals live on the south side. I figured they must have all been off arresting someone somewhere else, and put them out of my mind. I walked down to the end of the tracks, and the train pulled up, going towards Howard.

The clearing out of the train at the Roosevelt stop is pretty impressive, it’s as if a sudden, violent regime of segregation imposed itself several decades ago and never really let go, keeping the city’s racial mix stuck in the late 1950’s. It’s almost as if the Brown/Orange/Pink stop named after Harold Washington is only a token nod to the city’s minority population.

There was nobody really interesting on the train until about the Chicago and State stop, when a drunk guy with a vacuum cleaner got into my car. But he didn’t do anything, and got off at Addison. I stared at him for a while, but it was kind of pointless.

When I could finally rip my eyes away from him, I noticed we were on the elevated tracks, running high above a landscape dotted with middle-class row houses and what looked to be prospering businesses, though from the train, I really couldn’t tell. In fact, from the train, there was little I could tell about the character of the neighborhood that wouldn’t have been a stereotype based on the people who got off at each stop.

I imagine, though, that Ponce de Leon should have looked to the North Side for the fountain of youth, that Cortes should have looked to the North Side for El Dorado, and that Henry Hudson should have looked to the North Side for the Northwest passage, because it seemed so magical in my imagination.

When we finally reached the Morse Red Line stop, I was too excited to stay on the train. I got off, stepped down, and looked around. There, in all its glory, was the #96 Lunt bus. Seriously. The Lunt bus. I got on the bus on the north side, hoping that it would be better than the busses on the south side, but it still smelled faintly of urine.

It took me a couple of blocks to a mixed use strip that looked a lot like 55th Street east of the Metra tracks, or 53rd Street east of Ellis. As I walked back, I saw a couple of police cars, and was excited. Perhaps they were going to point out where I could find some unicorns to make my trip worthwhile. I asked the officer where I could find a unicorn, but my White Sox hat gave away that I was a South Side native, and he tried to beat me with a truncheon.

I ran away, back to the train and got back on. I looked over, and there was made-up Ernie Banks and the Ghost of the First Mayor Daley, chatting with Anton Cermak. They saw me eavesdropping on their fake conversation, and First Mayor Daley said to me, “Son, you know Bridgeport’s on the South Side, right? Ain’t nothing up here but a bunch of shitbirds who don’t get out often enough.”